Rebuilding partition tables

Question

Being the silly person I am, I accidentally used clean command in DISKPART on the wrong HDD (external via USB). I know all the data is still there as I didn't use the all parameter, and I even remember where the partition starts, one is NTFS or FAT32 and the other is ext3.

Right now the HDD is just a blob of unrecognized space, is there anyway to rebuild the indexes on the partitions? All the important data is on the NTFS/FAT32 HDD. Oh, and preferably a way to pause and resume is crucial too.

Answer 1

Some partition recovery tools should be able to handle this (recreating the indexes.) Just make sure that if you recover the entire drive, do NOT recover the data to the source drive. It's a common mistake lots of people make doing partition/drive recoveries and being a flash drive, you should easily have enough space on a hard drive to restore this data. It can be a very simple process, but if its been used a lot (and partitioned multiple times) you may find multiple versions and lots of extra or unnecessary data.

I've had luck using lots of different packages. Youtube actually has a ton of how-to videos on this. Do your research when it comes to the recovery software however. The internets are littered with cheap or questionable software resellers or unscrupulous types that just repackage and sell freeware.

Answer 2

Other tools I've tried for restoring partitions have been pretty hit and miss, whereas R-Studio has worked for me in nearly all cases.

Answer 3

use a live cd with testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd